Month: October 2016

ZeroMQ is small, fast and very easy to use messaging library, which works equally well both within the same process and over the network. Despite being written in C++, it has bindings for most of the languages you can come up with. And it’s free. Hurrah!

In previous posts I mentioned ‘microservice communication’ quite often, but never actually explained how exactly that happens.

Because of services isolation, choices of transport are limited and most likely you’ll be using TCP or UDP to talk over the network. But how exactly this will happen depends on what patterns or tools you choose.

Everybody talks how good microservices are, but it’s less popular subject what challenges it brings. As any other tool it is good at solving one kind of problems, sucks at others, and comes at a price.

In case you’ve forgotten what microservices are, it’s an application building pattern that sees an application as a set of small independent services, which communicate with each other via some lightweight protocol.

What is docker-compose

Like docker itself allows managing single container, docker-compose makes it easy to control not just one, but all containers that make distributed app. This includes containers, networks, volumes and all related settings.

If you think about it, starting an app that has more than one container is less than trivial task and it gets exponentially harder as you add more or them. Let’s check out simple example: distributed web-application that consists of two containers – one with web content and one with database.